My Aunts and Uncle

I thought of writing a short story, an essay about my three aunts. They are my mom’s sisters. They have their own children but they made me feel special growing up, still now. When I had crisis a few years ago, they all helped me. One flew up from Georgia and stayed with me for a few days.

My family was pretty tight when I was growing up so we spent a lot of time together, my aunts their husbands my dad all my cousins, grandma and grandpa. Grandma and grandpa were actually separated but showed up for all the family events anyway. This was all on my mom’s side. Even though I don’t speak to my aunts all the time, I still feel a bond because of those early days. They also had a brother, the only male, who was schizophrenic.

Shit I had a special relationship with him. When I was unemployed back in 2000, I would visit him at the institution every couple of weeks with one of the aunts that I mentioned. We picked him up, and ate out, usually at the same diner. He smoked several cigarettes and would impart nuggets of insane genius which I loved. I generally enjoyed talking to him. He passed away in 2004. Maybe I’ll come up with something to write about my beautiful aunts and uncle. I’ve held off because anything I come up with is just too maudlin.

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24 comments on “My Aunts and Uncle”

on my moms side of the family, my grandpa and grandpa who were married forever. Long enough to have 10 kids. Was divorced when I was little. They both married again. My grandmas husband lived out in the woods in a shack with no plumping so sh would just go visit him occasionally.(I guess for some nuggie). My grandpa married this really weird lady. When we had any event in the family, My grandma would be there, my grandpa and of course his crazy ol’ wife. They could all sit and talk together like it was nothing lol

Thanks BB. They are cool. At my uncle’s funeral as they lowered the casket into the ground, we threw dollar bills in (I’m sure the attendants scrambled later on to collect them — lol!). He was famous for going around saying, ‘gimme a dollar, gimme a dollar.’ So we had the idea to do that!

Yeah I’m referring to the sugary kind of maudlin — just overly sentimental — the way, ironically I used to get when I was durnk — oh, I mean drunk! 🙂 I don’t know, I’ll figure out a way to do it where neither writer nor reader gets diabetes.

I often wish I could go back in time and spend a day with some of the special people in my life, especially if I didn’t let them know how much I appreciated them at the time, as teenagers and young adults so typically don’t. Like my grandma. If only I could spend a day in the kitchen baking and cooking with her, but at the time she was around, it wasn’t my thing. Now that it is, I won’t get that opportunity.

It’s not maudlin to get mushy and sentimental about family, it’s sweet. Although if you want some examples of how to write about your family without getting too sugary, read David Sedaris (“Naked” has the most family stories in it, I think).

He got some flack a few years ago for “making up” things about his family (he exaggerated a few things and took some creative license to make his essays more interesting). I think if you mix some alcohol, some creativity, and just a dash of dysfunction, you end up with the Sedaris clan.